NEW ARTISTIC NARRATIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE:

Contemporary biennials in Eastern Europe have become an important vehicle to place art in new contexts and reach new audiences. The EAST EUROPE BIENNIAL ALLIANCE aims to shape new forms of international solidarity by connecting the Biennale Matter of Art Prague, Biennale Warszawa, Kyiv Biennial, OFF-Biennale Budapest, and Survival Kit Festival Riga into one creative consortium.

BÉTON BLEU MAGAZINE spoke with the curators VASYL CHEREPANYN, Head of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv, and ESZTER SZAKÁCS, curatorial team member of the OFF-Biennale in Budapest, about new narratives in the East European region, financial independence and artistic tools for political emancipation.

Béton Bleu: Eszter, you are a curatorial team member of the OFF-Biennale in Budapest, Vasyl, you are co-curating the Kyiv Biennial. Both organizations, together with Biennale Matter of Art Prague and Biennale Warszawa, are co-founders of the East Europe Biennial Alliance (EEBA). What is the concept behind this transnational initiative?

Vasyl Cherepanyn: When we all met in 2018 at the symposium Unlearning Biennale organized by tranzit.cz in Prague, for us, curators and organizers of the biennials in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and Kyiv, it became evident, to which extent the cultural scenes in East European countries depend on the Western context. They are oftentimes directly attached to it, but East European cultural initiatives themselves are barely connected with each other. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s happening to our neighbours! We then decided to come up with an inter-institutional initiative, which goes beyond the logic of the nation-state and would be capable of tackling the cultural processes as well as political developments in the East of Europe from an international and interregional perspective.

Eszter Szakács: In that sense, the East Europe Biennial Alliance fills quite a big gap with its attempt to build up a regional infrastructure to support art and culture in the East of Europe. It’s important to note that when we speak about the “East,” East(ern) Europe, or even the former “Eastern Bloc,” we never mean one homogenous bloc. The East is, and was, culturally, socially, and even politically heterogeneous. In EEBA we have members located in post-socialist and post-Soviet countries, and with the recent joining of Survival Kit Festival Riga, there is now also a member rooted in a post-Soviet Baltic country. We as members share many things across our local conditions, but there are also differences, which we have to recognize and work with.

ESZTER SZAKÁCS, curatorial team member of the OFF-Biennale in Budapest (left) and VASYL CHEREPANYN, Head of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv (right)

BB: Can you explain this new notion of the “East”?

Vasyl: We learnt something in the 1990s and in the beginning of the 2000s: Many East European countries, including Ukraine, are somewhat ashamed of belonging to “the East.” Being part of the East is a pejorative term. Instead, they say, they are part of “the centre.” That is basically the origin of the notion “Central Eastern Europe” – this imagined centre, an idea that is both desired and very elusive. Naming ourselves “East Europe Biennial Alliance” is also taking a political stance as it implies not only countries from the East that joined the EU, but the whole East European (semi-)periphery. A periphery that is burning now.

Eszter: Also, we at EEBA are of a younger generation, most of us were born during the final years of the Cold War, but our coming-of-age took place in the new regime that came after 1989. This also means that our approach to the “East” and Eastern Europe, as well as to the socialist and Soviet past differs from the generation who had formative experiences under socialist and Soviet times.

BB: Speaking of this “former East”: Are there still post-socialist infrastructures today that you can use to work together on a transnational level?

Eszter: In Hungary there is the Studio of Young Artists' Association, harking from the socalist era, which was established in 1958 as a sub-organization of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party’s Art Fund to help young artists at the beginning of their careers. Today it is still an active and key organisation in the contemporary art scene in Hungary. If you have syndicate organisations like this, you have Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish versions of it. In this sense, the socialist and Soviet art infrastructure was following similar models and ideologies, but as a whole, it was not transnational. We envision the East Europe Biennial Alliance to work on a transnational level: not to be the sum of member biennials, but to bring new dimensions to the biennials that each work in and with their respective local realities. 

Vasyl: I would say: If there is anything left of the post-Soviet infrastructure in the cultural field, it’s the infrastructure of ruins. Within the Kyiv Biennial activities, we’ve been trying to rearrange and reactivate those infrastructure-leftovers. After the breakup of the USSR, many people were left on the street with their professions and skills, the same happened with the infrastructures. What we’ve attempted to do within our several biennial editions is to create an institutional and cultural bricolage through combining newer institutions with established state institutions as well as with those sites that used to be part of the artistic infrastructure of the Soviet times, but which are currently on the margins of any kind of contemporary cultural production.

BB: Is there a new kind of artistic practice in the “East European periphery” compared to the “Western” countries?

Vasyl: We don’t want to take just some fashionable concepts or artists from the West and adapt them to local realities. It’s the opposite. The problematic fields we tackle are shaped by the political context and social conditions we live in. Take the war in Ukraine – it’s not just some curatorial topic, this is Realpolitik. And we observe a very telling tendency especially in the (semi-)peripheral countries to establish a new type of biennials that are grass-rooted, built from below and are not dependent on state funding. We, as the Alliance members, have embarked on this institutional experiment, too. 

Eszter: One major part of the Alliance is to create a safety net. The biennales – on their own – are pretty fragile. Our idea is to strengthen each other through cooperation. What is perhaps different in the East of Europe compared to the West is that this alliance is created out of a kind of an emergency, in some cases as a means of survival, which in turn also provides us with exciting experimentations in infrastructure building.

BB: How is the Alliance funded? Does the EU help?

Eszter: The Alliance itself is not funded, not by the EU or anyone, but its projects are. For instance, our official launch in autumn 2020, an online symposium called Culture at Crossroads: What Collaboration Do We Want in Eastern Europe?, was funded by the Visegrad Fund. The current Kyiv Biennial edition Allied, which we curate as EEBA, is supported by a range of foundations. This is what’s problematic about funding in general: There is almost no funding to support the structure in the long run, only funding to support specific projects. This puts constraints on the way we operate. 

Vasyl: There is so much talk today about transnationalism and international cooperation, but cultural initiatives are, in fact, always nation-based. The question of funding is also an attempt to think beyond the nation-state. There is, of course, a possibility to apply together with partners to get support for projects, but when it’s over, the cooperation stops. In the Ukrainian situation, without international backup, presence and involvement we would be lost. It would be simply impossible and wouldn’t even make much sense for us as an institution to conduct anything here.

Eszter: State funding can be a stable source for art initiatives, but it can also be problematic. If there is a drastic political change in the ways state funding for the arts takes place, as we have experienced in Hungary, then you can easily see the limits of this type of funding. OFF-Biennale Budapest is a grassroots initiative based on the idea that curator Hajnalka Somogyi proposed in 2013. She envisioned an art biennial that is not dependent on Hungarian state funding and operates outside of state infrastructure. It was necessary to start establishing and developing an independent art scene in Hungary. Now we are the largest civil independent arts initiative in Hungary.

BB: How exactly are you working with each other on an artistic level?

Vasyl: Very often things get lost simply because they take place in the spaces our attention is not focused on. Art events taking place in Berlin or Paris are visible internationally, but other venues in Belgrade, Kyiv, Riga or Budapest are totally invisible. And it’s crucial to take these events and exhibitions to different contexts and present them accordingly. It makes the region more coherent and self-reflective, more grouped together in a way. The cultural scene(s) can be more aware and understand what it consists of. Europe’s East is very much like that “touching the elephant” effect: Whenever you’re in contact with one part, it always feels like something completely different. 

Eszter: I totally agree. For the Kyiv Biennial that EEBA curated, for instance, we always asked what the relevance of a project that travelled from Prague or Budapest is for Kyiv specifically. This is how getting to know each other works in practical terms: The same issue – or the same elephant, as Vasyl said – looks different from different spots and perspectives, even within the same region of Eastern Europe.

BB: How did the pandemic influence your work? Did it make your cooperation easier?

Vasyl: The pandemic has affected all of us profoundly, most importantly, it deprived us of many aspects of our political self. So many cultural institutions were pretty eager to take on these online formats and were very fast in reorganizing their activities. At the same time, I think of an institution as something physical, something present in the city: It’s very much about the materiality of cultural activities. As in politics, changes don’t come when you’re only online. When people use their physical bodies, they may have an effect on the actual political agenda.

Eszter: The last time we saw each other in person was at the Kyiv Biennial in November 2019. Since then, we did two public discussions online: Culture at Crossroads as part of the Biennale Matter of Art, and East to East in “Budapest,” part of the OFF-Biennale. However, we also want to discuss our long-term goals, we want to look into future possibilities. This kind of “team-building” is hard to do via Zoom. We can have meetings, but it’s not the same thing.

Vasyl: Virtual formats are more like desserts (and deserts). Online should not be the main course. The main course is the physical space!

BB: Thank you for your time.

Interview: Ana-Marija Cvitic

Find out more about the East European Biennal Alliance here:

https://eeba.art/en

07/11/2021

Eszter Szakács (1983) is a curator and researcher. Since 2017, she is a curatorial team member of the grassroots civil initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she worked at tranzit/hu in Budapest (2011–2020), where, among others, she coedited the online international art magazine Mezosfera and the book IMAGINATION/IDEA: The Beginning of Hungarian Conceptual Art – The László Beke Collection, 1971 (2014), and curated the collaborative research project Curatorial Dictionary. Along with Naeem Mohaiemen, she coedited the forthcoming anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended (tranzit/hu, Van Abbemuseum, SALT, Tricontinental, and Asia Culture Center). Her research and practice revolve around grassroots art organizing, questions of internationalisms, intersections between Eastern Europe and the Global South, as well as exhibitionary forms of research.

Vasyl Cherepanyn (1980) is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kyiv). He holds a PhD in philosophy (aesthetics) and has been lecturing at University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), University of Helsinki, Free University of Berlin, Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, University of Vienna, Institute for Advanced Studies of the Political Critique in Warsaw, Greifswald University. He was also a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He recently co-edited Guidebook of The Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018) and '68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019) and curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam) and Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague) projects. VCRC is the organizer of the Kyiv Biennial (The School of Kyiv, 2015; The Kyiv International, 2017; Black Cloud, 2019; Allied, 2021) and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. VCRC has received the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award for Culture in 2015, and the Igor Zabel Award Grant for Culture and Theory 2018.

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